Decades of football history combined with talented 2016 rosters will make Friday’s Neville at Ruston game a newsworthy event for Louisiana; the Great American Rivalry Series turns it into a national event.

The Great American Rivalry Series travels around the nation to some of the famed rivalries in high school football and has chosen to get involved in this year’s Neville-Ruston game, including a trophy presented by the United States Marines to the winner.

“If you look at the teams on that calendar, there's some pretty good rivalry matchups there – some you've heard of, some you have not – so it's an honor to be involved in something like that,” Neville coach Mickey McCarty said.

The game itself is a rematch of one of Neville’s closest games en route to the 2015 state championship, a 28-12 win.

“They return a lot of those guys, and they actually held us to our least point total we had in any single game, so we know we have our work cut out to score points,” McCarty said.

The Neville defense has a tough task ahead of it, too, as Ruston has diversified its offense in the offseason with the addition of some I-formation looks to its preexisting shotgun and pistol offense.

“They've got a lot of offense in their package: some I-formation, some veer things and some spread one-back with a quarterback that can throw it and run it,” McCarty said. It's similar -- as far as some I-back and some shotgun -- to what we saw last week in West Monroe. They run some similar things, but at the same time, there's obviously some differences.

“It's early in the year and nobody has a playbook that's real deep yet, so I think we have enough defense in to adjust to what we need to, we just have to get lined up properly. We had some alignment issues (against West Monroe) and we have to do some things better on both sides of the ball, obviously, but as far as defending them, they present some problems. You just don't know how much of what you're going to get.”

Ruston coach Brad Laird saw a, “fast, physical, athletic football team,” in Neville when he watched the Tigers at last week’s Bayou Jamboree – especially an offense that is eerily similar to the one his Bearcats took on last season, given the number of returners at select perimeter positions.

“We'll do some things different: I think year-to-year you always tweak some things you do, what was good and what wasn't good,” Laird said. “We did some good things defensively in that game, we just got to the point where we wore out at the end.

“For both teams, things have changed; probably more so for the Bearcats, in terms of the personnel on the field.”